Jordan Lower House to Discuss Zionist Regime Gas Deal

Date: 13 January 2020 - 21:37

News ID: ۷۵۰۲۸

AMMAN (Dispatches) – Jordan’s Lower House Speaker Atef Tarawneh has called for speeding up the drafting of a law to annul the gas deal between Jordan and the Zionist regime.
In a statement, Tarawneh called for intensified efforts to complete the law which is to be presented to the parliament. He said the lower house will hold a session next week to discuss the deal in detail.
The state-run National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) said earlier that it started importing gas from the Israeli-occupied territories via Texas-based Noble Energy.
NEPCO’s Director General Amjad Rawashdeh claimed that the Zionist regime’s gas was the "only choice available due to regional circumstances.”
Hundreds of Jordanians took to the street earlier this month to protest the start of natural gas importing from the occupying regime.
In downtown Amman, the demonstrators chanted slogans against the deal, calling on the government to go back on its decision and scrap the agreement, which they labeled as "unwanted and rejected.”
They urged the parliament to press the government into abolishing the agreement, which they said was "against Jordan’s interests and only serves the Israeli economy.”
"We are here to say no ... Israel is an occupation force and we should not be buying from them what is not theirs ... Israel never wastes an opportunity to harm Jordan so we shouldn’t import from them while we have many alternatives,” Salman Haj Abed, one of the protesters in Amman, said.
The Zionist regime looks at Jordan and Egypt as the potential buyers of gas which it claims to have found in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt’s trade with the regime is larger than its trade with some Arab countries.
The reserves, discovered in the eastern Mediterranean Levant Basin since 2009, straddle the territories of several countries - including Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria - whose relations are strained on a number of fronts.
Egypt had once sold gas to the Zionist regime, but the deal was terminated by Egypt’s state-run gas company EGAS following the ouster of the country’s dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
Cairo has also been accused of acting as the regime’s proxy in maintaining Tel Aviv’s years-long blockade on the Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip.